Stake Solana with Kiln - enterprise-grade staking

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a type of consensus mechanism used to validate cryptocurrency transactions. Through PoS, validators can contribute to the block production of a chain while keeping environmental concerns to a minimum, which is becoming an increasingly large issue in Proof-of-Work, the consensus algorithm used in Bitcoin.

By staking capital rather than energy, validators risk losing a portion of their value and future potential for staking by misbehaving while creating blocks. This incentivizes collaboration and minimizes malicious activity in the consensus process. 

Both are consensus algorithms, helping to democratize participation in securing a blockchain. dPoS is an iteration of PoS combining real-time voting with a system based on reputation to reach consensus across the blockchain. Voting power is still determined by how many tokens they have however.

SOL rewards are issued once per epoch in your staking account, meaning SOL rewards compound. An epoch of time in Solana is approximately two days. Note that the staking yields vary for each epoch as the inflation rate and total active stake change.

Yes, the interest you earn over each reward period is added to the principal balance so that eventually you earn interest on your interest, and can grow your wealth exponentially.

Solana implements a slashing mechanism for poor promotion. This includes downtime for validators and their delegators and for nodes that attempt to vote on two separate attestations at the same time. Slashed validators will add bonded tokens to the mining pool.

Slashing also occurs if Solana’s Proof-of-History generates an invalid hash.

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You can start staking SOL with 0.01 SOL and there is no maximum stake.

You can maintain custody of your SOL through any wallet or custodian solution of your choosing. Kiln’s SOL staking is non-custodial, only you can access your funds by controlling the underlying wallet which holds a claim to the funds.

It will take between 1 and 2 epochs for your SOL to be unstaked (48-96 hours).

For every slot, the validator is expected to sign attestations. If submitted attestations are good, the validator receives rewards, otherwise it receives penalties. In case the validator is offline it will also receive penalties.

The average block time on Solana is ~400 milliseconds.

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There are no strict minimum amounts of SOL required to run a validator on Solana. However, in order to participate in consensus, a vote account is required to have a rent-exempt reserve of 0.02685864 SOL. Voting also requires sending a vote transaction for each block that the validator agrees with, which can cost up to 1.1 SOL per day. From an infrastructure point of view, a vote account is defined by 3 keypairs:

• Validator identity: a SystemAccount used to pay the transaction fees of all the vote transaction fees submitted to the Vote Account
• Vote authority: used to sign each vote transaction the validator wants to submit to the cluster
• Authorized withdrawal: used to withdraw funds from a vote account

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In the context of Proof-of-Stake blockchains, the gross reward rate (GRR) refers to the total or gross amount of rewards earned from staking before deducting any fees or expenses. This is a reward rate that fluctuates with the operations of the protocol and the performance of validators, it is not set by Kiln. The net reward rate (NRR), on the other hand, takes into account the deductions or expenses, providing a measure of the actual rewards received after subtracting fees or costs.

There are many existing resources but we invite you to visit the Solana foundation's website.

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